Friday, September 04, 2009

Best. Movie. Ever.

We are talking about Julie & Julia.

And, okay, it's not the best movie ever. (First off, no androids. Second, where's Joseph Cotten?) It's a pretty good movie, though, especially if you happen to be moving from Long Island City to Europe. And -- funny thing -- some of us are.

The scenes in LIC are overdone -- it's a great neighborhood in a great city, and any reasonable person would be happy to live here. Amy Adams should stop complaining and explore the best neighborhood in the best city on earth. (Why, she even shops at K & T Meats, around the corner from the Anonymous Rectory. And she may get all pouty-faced about it, but the nice guys at K & T have often slipped us some free sausage for our Easter breakfast).

The scenes in Paris are also overdone. Yes, it's the second-best-city on earth, but it isn't actually Heaven. So when the movie shows actual gates of pearl and a foundation of chrysoprase and jacinth, you know the producers have gone overboard. Still, they do make you want to be very, very good, so that you can go there someday.

But even if the picture is hard on New York and soft on the Frogs, it gets one thing exactly right. This is a little embarrassing, but we're just going to come out and say it, knowing that several readers will get where we're coming from. If a movie can't have androids, and it can't have Joseph Cotten, then there's only one way it can redeem itself, and that's where Julie & Julia shines: Lots of hot, steamy tall-girl-and-short-guy love scenes.

Granted, Mery Streep was wearing lifts, because Hollywood actresses aren't actually allowed to be tall. But Julia Child was a bruiser, and the movie doesn't shy away from that. The producers let her be tall, and they let Paul Child be short, and they let their lifelong romance be tender and sweet and actually surprisingly steamy for a picture which sometimes risks joining the Masterpiece Theatre school of bloodlessly mummified history. They're way hotter than Amy Adams and her whiny guy whose name escapes me but who looks like every other actor his age.